Florence Reasserts Itself as a Fashion City-State

ACTION BUILDS As the party heats up, guests break out in dance. Florence has become a hot spot on the men’s fashion calendar.Credit
Edoardo de Lillo

Florence, Italy

CLUTCHING a bunch of long-stemmed flowers, Mark McNairy held them just below his belt buckle and gave a hired party photographer a leering grin.

It was late. A buttery sickle moon nicked the dark sky above Chianti. The air at a classical Tuscan villa set high on a hill was scented with jasmine and with other more potent aromatics. A group of musicians imported from Puglia for the evening was working the crowd to a pitch, playing the music of the taranta, an ancient folk dance that ends in a dervish frenzy intended to shake off the pain of living.

But Mr. McNairy was feeling no evident pain. Neither were the 100 other guests invited to the Milky Pig party, given by Woolrich Woolen Mills during Pitti Uomo, the colossal men’s wear trade fair that twice yearly attracts flocks of fashion peacocks to this city.

Typically speaking, Mr. McNairy is a buttoned-down type, a responsible new father and a fashion designer known for his work with sober, traditional brands like J. Press. But if spending a lot of time around the occupationally attractive teaches you anything, it’s that if style is a tool, it’s also a trap. And while the social constraints of being female suggest that women who work in fashion don’t get many opportunities to loosen their corsets (although there was that party in Paris one season, where one highly placed editor was spotted on the dance floor with her skirt above her head), the same cannot be said of their male counterparts.

That is why the Milky Pig party — and, in fact, Florence — is always a hot spot on the circuit.

Few can be expected to recall that a fashion cycle that seems so entrenched was not always as organized as it is now. New York used to come at the end of the show season, a boon for designers dedicated to the sincerest form of flattery. Milan followed New York.

And long before Milan became a fixture on the fashion calendar, shows in Italy were held in Rome. Florence eventually stole Rome’s thunder; then Milan, in turn, swiped the shows from Florence. Now there is a move afoot to restore the primacy of this Renaissance city as the key destination for both fashion designers and buyers.

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SEDATE, FOR NOW Dining at the Milky Pig party in Florence.Credit
Edoardo de Lillo

To that end, Pitti Immagine, the Florentine fashion trade group, last year hired the public relations agency that represents Jil Sander. Soon enough, Jil Sander’s designer, Raf Simons, decamped from Milan and decided to show here, expecting the international press would follow him, which it did. “We needed some provocative gesture,” Lapo Cianchi, the Pitti communications director, said before the Sander show, which was held in the garden of a villa overlooking the city.

Haider Ackermann also chose Florence for his first men’s wear show, and it is no struggle to see why. While Milan hardly lacks historical structures, nothing there touches Florence as a stage set for the pageant of fashion. The Ackermann show was in the Palazzo Corsini, where long tables were set in a salon as if for a feast, and guests were seated on velvet sofas, Biedermeier chairs and Regency settees.

It was, said Gianluca Longo, the style director of the London Evening Standard magazine, “completely civilized.”

The Milky Pig party was, by contrast, a bit more rustic. It’s part of the amazement induced by this city that one can — if, that is, one happens to be Joerg Koch, the editor of the small but influential Berlin journal 032c — riffle through invitations in the comfort of a vast hotel suite featuring a grand piano and frolicking putti, and choose which gilded salon one will have drinks in, which show one will see in which palazzo, and at which after-party in which dive (Crisco Disco is popular this week) one will end the night.

At 7:30 Wednesday evening, Mr. Koch boarded a shuttle bus of the sort usually filled with tourists, along with Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, and other colleagues, and rode 70 minutes to reach the Milky Pig party, down a country road marked with two enormous umbrella pines.

The unstated theme of the party was heritage, since Woolrich Woolen Mills, one of the oldest continuously operating mills in the United States, was fading fast until it was revitalized some years back by a partnership headed by the Italian Andrea Cane and aided by the designer Daiki Suzuki, who filtered a selection of American classics through his distinctively Japanese sensibility.

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NIGHT MUSIC Officina Zoè, a band imported from Puglia for the evening, played the music of the taranta, an ancient folk dance, to shake up the guests.Credit
Edoardo de Lillo

“There is a big obsession all over the world with heritage brands right now,” Valeria Caffagni, the marketing director of WP Lavori in Corso, which licenses Woolrich globally, said at the Milky Pig party.

“Like all obsessions, it will be done in a year,” she added, but that judgment may be premature.

It is certainly worth noting that everyone, including commercial giants like J. Crew, has suddenly introduced editions of “iconic” stuff like Quoddy moccasins (still hand-stitched in Maine); that Levi’s rolled out plans to reproduce classic jeans from the 20th century in limited editions; that Timex announced it would bring back the Twist-O-Flex band.

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On a smaller scale, investors hunting down venerable labels have snapped up firms like the fabled English cobbler Grenson, whose thick-soled brogues are currently the shoe to covet among the fashionable in Florence, who wear them without socks and with skinny khakis rolled up Tom Sawyer-style.

“The young customers we have now are, like, really hip kids,” Mr. McNairy once told The New York Times, referring to a new generation of J. Press customers, the same ones he presumably plans to attract in his new job as Mr. Suzuki’s successor at Woolrich.

Mr. Koch, of 032c, pointed out that “heritage is usually better when it’s somebody else’s.” As he spoke, guests filled their plates with mounds of the spit-roasted suckling pig for which the party is named. Waiters circulated with platters of batter-fried zucchini flowers and crisp sage leaves glazed with anchovy paste. Two young bartenders were kept busy popping corks from bottles of ice-cold wine.

“Future, past, present, it’s all the same” to the bright talents behind labels like Woolrich Woolen Mills, Mr. Koch added. “What’s great is that it’s not tied up in the ideas of futurism or in nostalgia.”

It is history, someone suggested, without the actual bother of learning history. Mr. Koch laughed at the thought, and then the band struck up some crazy tune and Takeharu Sato, the fashion editor of the international digest Monocle, leapt onto the grass in a straw hat and patterned kimono, and suddenly a scene crystallized in the Tuscan night that was something like a Fellini bacchanal staged by Riverdance.

A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2010, on Page ST8 of the New York edition with the headline: Florence Reasserts Itself As a Fashion City-State. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe